1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and system for performing commerce, and more preferably to a method and system for performing electronic commerce (i.e., “e-commerce”) with full anonymity for the participants.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, rapid development of electronic commerce over the Internet has occurred. However, a perceived problem of this new type of commerce is that many consumers are still afraid of the lack of privacy protection to which one is exposed by using electronic commerce and other usage of the Internet.
However, in reality, several policies and technologies exist which allow to use the benefits of electronic commerce with complete protection of privacy and even complete anonymity. For instance, protocols for anonymously buying solid goods and electronic goods have been disclosed respectively in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/129,826, filed on Aug. 5, 1998, entitled “Method and apparatus for remote commerce with customer anonymity”, by M. Shub et al., and in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/569,068, filed on May 11, 2000, entitled “Achieving Buyer-Seller Anonymity for Unsophisticated Users Under Collusion Amongst Intermediaries” by P. Dubey et al. However, despite these advances in security, there is still a perceived lack of privacy and security in performing e-commerce by a wide majority of potential users.
Further, previously, in the context of regular contact between a commercial organization and a customer, where the nature of the transaction heavily depends on some collection of data associated to/with the customer, such as the precise contract, past information, information about the transaction being made, etc., conventional methods forced the data to be attached to the identity of the customer (e.g., the word “forced” should be understood as “forced up to unbearable duress”).
With the development of Information Technology, such data were first input in a computer system for better handling and processing of the transaction. A next stage of development of Information Technology allowed making heavier use of the computer, in particular for data mining, to better evaluate the risk associated to each customer, to evaluate the risk of portfolios, to perform customer segmentation for different purposes (commercial and marketing strategy, pricing, etc.), and other aspects of business intelligence and use of advanced analytics.
However, using such a method of business intelligence has arguably been a first serious blow to customer privacy, just because business intelligence allows a company to learn more about their customers than what the customers have willingly (or knowingly) approved.
Because business intelligence has become so precious, both for marketing and related functions, and for customer relationship management purposes, some companies have used data about their customers as an asset that they would sell to other companies. This has been another serious breach to customer privacy.
While trying to limit privacy violations, and even trying to restore fuller privacy than was ever possible before the beginning of modem Information Technology, it is still desirable to achieve this goal without compromising the analytic tools which have allowed better customer understanding and thereby better pricing. Otherwise, without these tools being available to the relevant industry and marketers, the customer would have to pay for the price of reduced commercial efficiency.